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Conservative students who voted for Mr. Trump say that even though their candidate won, their views are not respected. Some are adopting the language of the left, saying they need a “safe space” to express their opinions — a twist resented by left-leaning protesters.

Administrators are struggling to maintain a balance between political factions. But some college presidents have entered the fray with statements that seem more sympathetic to the left, in some cases provoking a backlash. . . .

For conservative students like Ms. Deletka, the messages from university officials, seemingly assuming that everyone on campus was upset about the election result, were particularly offensive. . . .

Ms. Delekta described how she had been offended when a classmate wondered why as a “white female,” she had not voted for Hillary Clinton. She resented what she saw as identity politics on campus.

“My identity is so much more than my race and my gender,” Ms. Delekta said. “We’re all so much more similar than we think.”

She was able to separate Mr. Trump’s policies from his personal attitudes toward women, she said later. “I’m not electing a grandpa or a babysitter,” Ms. Delekta said.

Ibtihal Makki, a self-confident senior in a pink hijab who is studying biopsychology and neuroscience and is chairwoman of a student government diversity committee, objected to conservatives on campus saying they needed safe spaces to express their views.

Of course she did. And it looks like I was ahead of the curve here. And Pres. Mark Schlissel’s really blown it at Michigan.

And students should be punching back. Despite all the talk about “diversity” and “inclusion,” many campuses — Michigan clearly among them — are marginalizing and “othering” Trump supporters and conservative/libertarian students in general.

But conservative/libertarian students are members of the “university community” too and deserve to be treated with respect, and to have their political views treated as legitimate. Students should demand this from administrators, and alumni, parents, and legislators should demand it from universities.

Hillary Clinton on Thursday decried the spread of fake news online, calling it an “epidemic” that Congress should take action against.

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said during a speech on Capitol Hill.

Some Democrats have argued the spread of anti-Clinton fake news online contributed to her electoral loss to Donald Trump.

Emphasis added.

This is all about discrediting Donald Trump, and the First Amendment be damned. Besides, it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried at least once in recent years to repeal free speech.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Trump should troll the Democrats by taking this seriously, then announcing he’s going to act against fake news, then listing all the bogus stories about him from the New York Times. . . . Or maybe the GOP Congress should invite Hillary to testify on the subject. How long before she smells the trap? I mean, normally when one has lost the Executive and Legislative branches to the other party is not the time to call for government censorship of political speech on vague and mutable grounds.

Some of the shock of Trump’s victory is surely due to the bubble that exists in Hollywood and New York, the Pauline Kael–esque sense that nobody could have voted for Trump. But some of it also derives from celebrities’ self-assured belief that they have an outsized impact in the world of politics.

Clearly that view infused the Clinton campaign: Hillary trotted out Lena Dunham of Girls fame, she of the false rape accusations and gleeful admissions of sexually abusing her sister, on the campaign trail all year long; Clinton advocates such as Elizabeth Banks took time off from producing bad a cappella sequels to film ads; singers and actors all joined to make a difference by producing a glossy version of Rachel Platten’s maddening “Fight Song.”

And not only didn’t those things matter, they actually helped drive voters away from Clinton. They exacerbated the image of Clinton as an out-of-touch elitist who spent her free time hanging out with Katy Perry, even as Donald Trump, at a stadium in rural Ohio, took yet another boisterous swipe at elitism. But it wasn’t just because these celebrities were rich and out of touch that Americans were put off by them.

It’s because those celebrities were the people most likely to judge red-state Americans as rubes — nasties intent on targeting Muslims and gays and blacks and women. The unearned moral superiority of America’s celebrity class rests in their open condemnation of flyover Americans as brutish louts, and their self-parodying belief that they are civil-rights heroes.

Two Democratic House members on Wednesday announced legislation to create an independent commission to investigate efforts by Russia to interfere with the U.S. election.

The bill comes from Oversight Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee’s CIA subcommittee.

The structure of the nongovernmental panel would be modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and would include 12 bipartisan members.

Specifically, the commission will be charged with investigating Russian hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s personal email, as well as the scanning of electoral systems in some states and the dissemination of fake news and propaganda.

Republicans should probably encourage Democrats’ obsession with this stuff, though, as it will distract them from thinking about why they actually lost.

According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.

To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump.

Let’s focus on one of these incidents, the time the solicitor general of the United States acknowledged that religious institutions that oppose as a matter of internal policy same-sex marriage may lose their tax exemptions. At oral argument in the Obergefell same-sex marriage case, there was the following colloquy:

Justice Samuel Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­ sex marriage?

Soliticitor General Verrilli: You know, I ­, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. ­ I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is ­­it is going to be an issue.

With the mainstream media busy celebrating the Supreme Court’s ultimate recognition of a right to same-sex marriage, this didn’t get that much attention in mainstream news outlets. But in the course of researching my book, “Lawless,” I noticed that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.’s answer was big news in both the conservative blogosphere and in publications catering to religiously traditionalist audiences. . . .

In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.

—Time magazine’s latest cover story. As Ed Morrissey writes in response, “Had Hillary Clinton managed to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the way that Trump did, there’s no doubt that Time would have bestowed this honor on her. Would they have subtitled her ‘President of the Divided States of America’? Almost certainly not, even though it would have applied just as well to Hillary; they would have probably used a ‘glass ceiling’ reference instead.”

SO IT’S BEEN ALMOST A MONTH, HAS ANYBODY DONE THIS? Time to Play Catch-Up on Hillary. “Donald Trump’s candidacy represented such a unique threat to democratic norms that the Fourth Estate decided it had an obligation to overcome its supposed objectivity in 2016. . . . The question now for reporters and editors, programmers and producers, is how do they respond after Hillary Clinton’s foe is vanquished? Reporters will have quite a bit of catching up to do when it comes to holding Hillary Clinton to account for what Americans discovered over the course of this campaign.”

The party at the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom on Dec. 15 is expected to feature fashion icon Anna Wintour, investor Alan Patricof, hedge fund manager Marc Lasry and more, according to the New York Post’s Page Six.

“Hopefully there’s no balconies so nobody can jump,” an insider told Page Six.

Clinton raised far more money than President-elect Donald Trump — as much as $1.3 billion, according to the The Washington Post, compared to Trump’s $795 million. But despite her edge in fundraising and in the popular vote, Trump won last month’s election via the Electoral College.

As though winning “via the Electoral College” was some sneaky new thing Clinton was unaware of?

When I say the blue states are in a depression, I don’t mean the collective funk they are in because they lost the election to Donald Trump.

I’m talking about an economic depression in the blue states that went for Hillary. Here is an amazing statistic. Of the 10 blue states that Hillary Clinton won by the largest percentage margins — California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut — every single one of them lost domestic migration (excluding immigration) over the last 10 years (2004-14). Nearly 2.75 million more Americans left California and New York than entered these states.

They are the loser states. They are all progressive. High taxes rates. High welfare benefits. Heavy regulation. Environmental extremism. Super minimum wages. Most outlaw energy drilling. The whole left-wing playbook is on display in the Hillary states. And people are leaving in droves. Day after day, they are being bled to death. So much for liberalism creating a worker’s paradise.

Now let’s look at the 10 states that had the largest percentage vote for Donald Trump. Everyone of them — Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota, and Idaho — was a net population gainer.

This is part and parcel of one of the greatest internal migration waves in American history as blue states especially in the northeast are getting clobbered by their low tax, smaller government rivals in the south, southeast and mountain regions.

By the way, pretty much the same pattern holds true for jobs. The job gains in the red states carried by the widest margins by Mr. Trump had about twice the job creation rate as the bluest states carried by Hillary.

To the contrary, speaking of “fake news,” I recall a certain prominent journalist—I’d rather not repeat his name—who trafficked in a wholly fake news story about a president, and whose forged documents were defended as “fake, but accurate.” So the media doesn’t have a lot of standing to complain about “fake news” just now, let alone a “post-truth” world they helped create.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Trump’s election stole my desire to look for a partner. “Once it was clear that Donald Trump would be president instead of Hillary Clinton, I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to gather my children in bed with me and cling to them like we would if thunder and lightning were raging outside, with winds high enough that the power might go out. The world felt that precarious to me. . . . I’ve lost the desire to attempt the courtship phase. The future is uncertain. I am not the optimistic person I was on the morning of Nov. 8, wearing a T-shirt with ‘Nasty Woman’ written inside a red heart. It makes me want to cry thinking of that. Of seeing my oldest in the shirt I bought her in Washington, D.C., that says ‘Future President.’ There is no room for dating in this place of grief. Dating means hope. I’ve lost that hope in seeing the words ‘President-elect Trump.'”

I’m pretty sure that the guy she was dating before dodged a bullet here. It’s another Trump miracle!

Other mainstream news outlets criticize The Washington Post for running the story.

“The organization’s anonymity, which a spokesperson maintained was due to fear of Russian hackers, added a cybersexy mystique,” Adrian Chen wrote in The New Yorker regarding the WaPo story. “But a close look at the report showed that it was a mess.”

And Patrick Maines criticized the story in The Hill, calling it “perhaps the shoddiest piece of feature writing since Rolling Stone published its blatantly false story about a campus rape at the University of Virginia.”

This whole “fake news” thing is such an obvious move to console Hillary voters while enlisting left-leaning social-media giants to silence the opposition.

The Left is trying to find a plausible excuse for Hillary Clinton’s historic loss to Donald Trump. In addition to racism, one common excuse is sexism, the theory that Americans are too misogynistic to put a woman in the White House.

As with many popular myths, this one’s already been scrutinized and the results aren’t what progressives would prefer. Unhappily for the Left, Americans, at least in their voting habits, are about as even-handed as we could ask. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a measure of sexism in the election — there may have been, but not the kind the Left imagines.

Back in 1997, three scholars, Richard Seltzer, Jody Newman and Melissa Voorhees Leighton examined every state legislative race from 1986 to 1994 and every governor’s race, U.S. House race and U.S. Senate race from 1972 to 1994. Combined, they analyzed almost 62,000 candidates. They divided the races into three categories: Male incumbents vs. female challengers, female incumbents vs. male challengers and male non-incumbents vs. female non-incumbents.

The results were unambiguous: When women run, women win just as often as men do.

Hillary’s campaign was the Ghostbusters reboot of politics: A second-rate product you were told you had to love, or be considered sexist.

I don’t care if the “fundamentals” favored the GOP. Trump was a fundamentals-defying opponent who should have landed flat on his face regardless of the baseline assumptions. I don’t care if Clinton racks up a nearly 3 million vote lead in the popular tally by grabbing up gobs of electorally superfluous ballots in California. She lost the election because she failed to win where she needed to win and where Democrats had a long record of winning — the upper Midwest — as well as where they win when they’re doing their jobs well (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina). That’s a sign of a campaign screw-up of monumental proportions.

Most of all, I don’t want to hear about how unfairly Clinton was treated by the media. In comparison to whom? All the other candidates who’ve run for president while under criminal investigation by the FBI? (Maybe that substantial handicap should have overridden the party’s presumption that she was owed the nomination because it was “her turn.”) Or do you mean, instead, that she was treated badly in comparison to her opponent? Really? You mean the one whose 24/7 media coverage was overwhelmingly, relentlessly negative in tone and content? Either way, a halfway competent campaign should have been able to take advantage of the great good fortune of running against Donald J. Trump and left him bleeding in the ditch.

Why didn’t it happen?

Read the whole thing — but the short version is that Clinton was a terrible candidate, a lackadaisical campaigner, and she squandered her enormous ad budget.

President Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” President Franklin Roosevelt had “fireside chats.” And now President-elect Donald Trump is reaching out to forgotten Americans with a message that he cares about their problems, and wants to help. This could be the Democrats’ worst nightmare. . . .

Losing a job, especially one you’ve held for a long time, is traumatic for a lot of reasons beyond money. For many people, especially men, a job is a major part of their identity. When technocratic politicians such as President Obama or Hillary Clinton dismiss their feelings, that’s irritating at the very least, especially when the Democratic Party as a whole, as operative Van Jones admitted recently, has a “problem with elitism.” If anything, Democrats have seemed almost smug about the travails of blue-collar America.

Trump, by contrast, promised to save Carrier jobs during the campaign and then, even though Obama mocked him for it at the PBS town hall (“What are you going to do? … What magic wand do you have?”) Trump then went ahead and delivered. A conspicuously kept campaign promise that benefits the little guy sends a signal of caring that talk of macroeconomics does not.

Read the whole thing, but let’s just broaden our view a bit to look at what Trump has done so far:

(1) Killed off dynastic politics, at least for now. If Hillary had won, 4 of the last 5 presidents would have come from two families. That’s not healthy.

(2) Kept Hillary out of the White House. She’s amazingly crooked even by DC standards, and amazingly inept even by DC standards as well. Debacles galore have been prevented by keeping her out. Plus, a Clinton presidency would have allowed the completion of the Obama Administration’s weaponization of the federal government and possibly ensured one-party rule for decades. And at the very least, it would have allowed the sorry gang that Obama and Clinton brought in (go read the Podesta emails!) to bore in for four to eight more years.

Those two reasons were reason enough to back Trump. But now let’s look at what’s happened since election night:

(3) The Mattis appointment. In one swoop, a big start toward fixing the military that Obama turned from warriors into social-justice warriors. Plus, a big blow to PC culture in general.

(4) The Carrier deal. Sure, everybody hates it — except for the voters. But it’s a promise kept, and one that makes American working-class folks feel like, finally, somebody cares. And it’s rich to see people who didn’t bat an eye at Solyndra going ballistic about $7 million over 10 years.

(5) Crushing the media’s sense of self-importance: They thought they were going to hand this election to Hillary. Now they’re realizing just how few people like or trust them, while Trump bypasses them using Twitter and YouTube. As I’ve said before, in the post-World War II era, the press has enjoyed certain institutional privileges based on two assumptions: (1) That it’s very powerful; and (2) That it will exercise that power responsibly, for the most part. Both assumptions have been proven false in this election cycle. Like many of the postwar institutional accommodations, this one will be renegotiated under Trump. It’s past time. After getting spanked in 2004 over RatherGate, the press realized with Katrina that if they all converged on the same lies they could still move the needle. Now they can’t.

(6) China. Obama’s foreign policy has been disastrous. Trump has served notice to China that we’re not abandoning our allies on the Pacific Rim. That will be noticed elsewhere, too.

(7) The transition. It was supposed to be “chaos,” but it’s been smooth and obviously well-planned. This bodes well and, among those willing to pay attention beyond SNL sketches, is changing minds.

Don’t get cocky, because he could still blow it and the press will be looking for anything they can use to destroy him, as they do with every Republican president. But for a guy less than 4 weeks out from the election, he’s doing awfully well.

If you’re genuinely interesting in being an effective critic of the next president, acting like Adolf Hitler is pounding at your doorstep every time Trump tweets something might not be the most effective plan in the long run.

Not to mention, the left has been such an astonishing hypocrite on so many issues related to Trump that it’s a bit difficult to move forward without pointing it out. Joining activists who’ve spent years attacking the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments—and now the Electoral College—in a newfound veneration of the Emoluments Clause is a bit much. Of course, Trump should be held accountable for his potential conflicts of interest, and one hopes conservatives who value good government will stand up when tangible evidence emerges that they exist. But the critics on the left aren’t serious about the Constitution. They’re serious about the Democratic Party.

Who can take journalists seriously—who’ve never once uttered a word of concern over the Democratic Party’s crusade to empower government to ban political speech by overturning Citizens United—when they lose it over a tweet about flag-burning? If it were up to them over the past eight years, Trump would now be imbued with far more power to achieve the things they fear—unilaterally. There was more angst over the president-elect ditching a reporting pool to have a steak than there was over any of President Obama’s numerous executive abuses. So when you hear people say democracy needs journalism “now more than ever,” remember that they’re admitting they weren’t doing their job yesterday. We also needed journalism more than ever back then.

Those who kept telling us that Hillary Clinton’s corrupt foundation and blatant favor-trading with the world’s most illiberal regimes were merely a conspiracy theory now act as if the republic will crumble if Trump’s hotel hosts the same Bahraini princes that were buying access in the Obama administration. . . .

What’s really upset Democrats, it seems to me, is that traditional conservative policy proposals—the sorts of thing Republicans have campaigned on for years, and the policies that have helped them win over 1,000 local seats and governorships and two wave elections—will probably be moving forward.

CHANGE: Liberal Pop-Culture Has Officially Outlived Its Usefulness in Politics. “During the campaign, the vote-shaming social media blitzes and testimonials we were bombarded with by Hillary’s celebrifriends seemed grating and tacky. Now their smugness is tangible evidence of a larger problem within the Democratic Party: Its image is controlled and marketed by a very narrow group of corporate interests, tech libertarians and affluent celebrities. A few years ago we’d have called them the 1 percent. The actual Democratic establishment’s agenda has often felt too absurd to articulate, so the party has chosen no identity over a bad one. So of course they had a marketing problem.”

HMM: Saban says Keith Ellison’s DNC win would bring ‘disaster’ to relationship between Jews and Dems. “Saban’s broadside – farther reaching, in calling him an ‘anti-Semite,’ than even some of Ellison’s conservative critics – is significant because of the mogul’s relationship to the DNC. Saban is better known for being one of the leading backers of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee defeated last month by President-elect Donald Trump, but he has also been a major donor to the party. In 2002, he paid $7 million toward the building of the then-new DNC headquarters in Washington D.C.”

The story of 2016 was ostensibly about how political party establishments had become empty vessels, vulnerable to takeover from populists with their own platforms and megaphones. The tumult in the GOP, from successive Tea Party rebellions to the nomination of Donald Trump, seemed to confirm this thesis. And even the Democratic elite showed some signs of weakness, as Bernie Sanders mounted a stronger-than-expected primary challenge to the establishment’s anointed candidate.

But the party’s 2016 collapse followed by the easy re-election of Nancy Pelosi as leader of the House Democratic caucus complicates this narrative. . . .

Consider: First, the Democratic elite dutifully steered voters to Hillary Clinton, virtually clearing the field for her in the primaries despite what should have arguably been—in retrospect, at least—a disqualifying scandal. And then, after four years of electoral carnage and virtual decimation of the party outside its coastal urban precincts, the Democrats have re-installed a veteran San Francisco liberal as the face of their party’s congressional agenda. To the extent that the rank-and-file has rebelled, it has not been very successful.

And neither has the party leadership, except at protecting its own positions.

Back in 2009 when Nancy Pelosi and the proggies were ramming ObamaCare down our throats someone opined that they were acting like they’d never lose another election. Since then they’ve spent eight years weaponizing the federal government. Now they’ve handed all that power over to The Donald and the Republicans and they’re terrified that we’ll do to them what they wanted Hillary to do to us. They’re looking under their beds and in their closets, terrified they might find the monsters of their own creation. The monsters they thought they’d control.

But monsters, once created, are notoriously difficult to control. You’d think all those English Lit majors would have remembered that, and we should remember it too…

It’s time for the FBI to conduct a detailed investigation into the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election’s aftermath. A thorough probe of the protests—to include possible ties to organizations demanding vote recounts—will give the Bureau’s integrity-challenged director, James Comey, a chance to sandblast his sullied badge.

Director Comey must also include “elector intimidation” on his post-election investigation list. Reports that members of the Electoral College are being harassed and threatened by angry, vicious (and likely Democratic Party) malcontents require Comey’s quick and systematic attention.

Michael Banerian, one of Michigan’s 16 electors, told CNN: “Obviously, this election cycle was pretty divisive. Unfortunately it’s bled over into the weeks following the election and I have been inundated with death threats, death wishes, generally angry messages trying to get me to change my vote to Hillary Clinton or another person, and unfortunately, it’s gotten a little out of control.”

A little out of control? What an understatement. Let me put it to you straight and personal, Jim. Identifying electors and then attempting to intimidate them into switching their votes is an ipso facto effort to overturn a national election. Which leads to a question a competent FBI Director would already have his agents asking: Is this elector threat scheme a coordinated operation?

Why, electors live in different states. A mind with a talent for the obvious would see a federal interest. Federal as in Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s the outfit you head, Mr. Comey—at least until the Obama Administration expires.

Which takes us back to the violent protests and political thuggery. Let me introduce you to two vicious Democratic Party operatives FBI agents should have quizzed and collared two months ago: Robert Creamer and The Hideous Scott Foval. These two creeps starred in Project Veritas’ video investigation of violent incitement during the political campaign.

Cue Sinatra and “My Way.” That’s how former Senate leader Harry Reid, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and President Obama ruled for eight years. They planned each charted course, each careful step. Now, they’re not finding it so amusing.

Mr. Coons is regretting giving up his tool to stop Donald Trump’s march of reformers. It’s a cabinet parade of charter-school-lovers, and law-and-order prosecutors and tax-cutters and ObamaCare-slayers, of the sort to give a good Delaware liberal night sweats. There was a day when not one of these nominees could have hoped to squeeze past a Senate filibuster. But Mr. Reid did it his way, and Mr. Trump keeps tweeting.

Former veep candidate Tim Kaine in October threatened that Republicans would be really, really sorry if they tried use what filibuster tools were left against a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court nominee. If Republicans “stonewall,” then a “Democratic Senate majority will say we’re not going to let you thwart the law,” he declared in October. Incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is now regretting that belligerence, and insisting that the Supreme Court filibuster is inviolate, and that his party never did kill it, you know, and that should count for something, and . . . blah, blah, regrets.

It would be hard to stall the confirmation process, at least after Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s regretful September news conference, the one where she stood tall and hit Republicans for refusing to confirm Mr. Obama’s end-of-the-road nominee, Merrick Garland. “This is not just some TV show [like] ‘Eight is Enough.’ Eight is not enough on the United States Supreme Court,” she railed. She’s joined in regret by the activists behind those trendy Twitter campaigns: #weneednine. #doyourjob. Bring on Mr. Trump’s own Tweetbomb: #likeyousaid.

Benjamin Ryan — considered a “Hillblazer” because he raised over $100,000 for the former Democratic nominee — detailed his suicidal nervous breakdown for the Huffington Post on Wednesday.

He said he was “catatonic, plagued by involuntary jerking motions, speech patterns disjointed, weeping uncontrollably.”

“I found out Donald Trump had won the Electoral College while midstream in providing a urine sample for the emergency psychiatric staff of a New York City public hospital,” Ryan writes. “The unlockable bathroom door in this unescapable wing was ajar, and I could hear the victorious Mike Pence’s sinister Sunday-school baritone taunting me with the truth from the hallway television.”

The most well-known possible ticket for the 2018 gubernatorial election is Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy, who could announce their joint bid for the top two posts as early as December, according to The Post and Courier.

Gowdy first won his seat in the U.S. Congress in 2010, and has effectively campaigned for reelection every two years, earning just over 62 percent in the 2016 election season over Democratic challenger Chris Fedalei.

Gowdy is chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and made news in recent months during his contentious interview with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her actions as secretary of state during the attack, and FBI Director James Comey for recommending Clinton not be charged with the possession of classified materials. Gowdy also serves on the Ethics Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Scott became the first black senator from South Carolina when he was appointed by Haley to fill Sen. Jim DeMint’s term in 2013. Scott later won his seat in the 2014 special election with 61 percent of the vote. He currently serves on the Special Committee on Aging, as well as the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and he Chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Housing Transportation, and Community Development.

Governorships are a traditional route to the White House, and a forward-looking GOP could do a lot worse than Tim Scott or Trey Gowdy.

Acknowledging that many news stories (such as celebrity obituaries) are largely drafted ahead of time with only a few dates and times left to be filled in, Newsweek has compiled stories celebrating Hillary Clinton’s landslide win on Nov. 8. It’s the safest of safe spaces for the Clinton supporters who were literally balled up on the floor and vomiting at the Javits Center that night.*

Well, when you wonder why people aren’t talking about things that you’re really upset about, maybe it’s because they don’t find them upsetting.

I don’t think that any of Trump’s appointments are “disastrous.” Sessions as AG wouldn’t be my first choice (that would probably be Randy Barnett, which is why I’m not the President-Elect) but for Trump he’s an excellent pick and will do what Trump wants — and do it more honestly than Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, not that that’s setting the bar very high.

Likewise, I’d have preferred John Allison as Treasury Secretary over Steve Mnuchin. But is Mnuchin “disastrous?”

DeVos as Education Secretary, again, not my first choice — I’d prefer someone who was more focused on higher-ed reform, but that’s just my hobbyhorse — but a fine pick with a strong focus on K-12 reform, which to be honest, hobbyhorse aside, probably needs it more. Who else is “disastrous?” Elaine Chao? Please.

As for “Twitter meltdowns,” where have you been for the past two years? This is what Trump does, and it neither hurts him nor forecasts what he’s actually going to do. You’re being trolled and it’s working. Trump has basically lured Democrats (and a few #NeverTrump Republicans) into defending flag-burning, and reminded people of Hillary’s position in 2005. Sure, the idea is dumb and unconstitutional (as I said yesterday), but it’s a tweet, not a piece of legislation. And it also brings attention to the fact that the Dems haven’t been exactly friendly to people’s First Amendment rights on issues they care about. Now they have to publicly argue that you should go to jail for not baking a gay wedding cake, but not for burning a flag. To the surprise of many Democrats, this turns out not to be the popular position.

They were obviously in the tank for Hillary. They even bragged about jettisoning their objectivity — or at least, any pretense thereof — in order to stop Trump. Now they’re complaining that charges that they’re biased are “not the fact?”

It’s not good for the country that we’re in the place that we’re in. But the press has played a huge part in getting us here, and shows no sign of taking any responsibility for it.

Hillary Clinton is co-sponsoring a bill to criminalize the burning of the American flag. Her supporters would characterize this as an attempt to find a middle way between those who believe that flag-burning is constitutionally protected free speech and those who want to ban it, even if it takes a constitutional amendment. Unfortunately, it looks to us more like a simple attempt to have it both ways.

ONCE YOU’VE DECIDED THAT MICRO-AGGRESSIONS, “MISGENDERING,” AND “HURTFUL” CHALKING CAN BE PUNISHED, WHAT GROUND DO YOU HAVE TO STAND ON when criticizing Donald Trump for wanting to outlaw flag-burning? Sure it’s a dumb and unconstitutional idea, but Dems have been on board with lots of those where speech is concerned.

I mean, pretty much the entire Democratic party supports overturning Citizens United — a case in which a filmmaker faced punishment for criticizing Hillary Clinton — so what free speech principles are they invoking now?

As the clock approached midnight on Election Day, our collective bubble began bursting and my iPhone began blowing up.

Myself included, members of my two professions, journalism and academia, were shell-shocked the presidential election didn’t go as expected.

“This is so f—ked up!” a journalist texted me.

“Oh my God!” pinged a professor. “We will be the ones ostracized if he wins.”

When Donald Trump’s victory was official, another academic acquaintance observed, “It’s an indictment on all of us.”

Indeed, it was an epic failure for the media-academia complex. Not just because nearly every poll showing that Trump had little to no chance of winning was a collaborative effort between media outlets and universities.

Journalists are supposed to inform the public about what’s happening in society. Professors are expected to prepare students for the real world. But this election, both were out of touch with reality. While some correctly predicted the outcome, most of us perished the thought. Our hubris may have even suppressed Hillary Clinton’s turnout and mobilized angry Trump supporters.

We need to reckon with our flaws, or risk becoming completely irrelevant in the political process. Here are some ways we can improve.

First, we must stop being insufferable know-it-alls. As scribes and scholars, we have expertise in a particular beat or field, but that doesn’t make us qualified to determine which candidate is best to lead 320 million Americans, each of whom has many and varied needs. Nor is it our job.

Now that kind of talk will get you ostracized in the media and universities.

The Democratic Party’s current festival of re-examination is both necessary and justified. They have just lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in recent memory. Lockstep media support and a much larger war chest were not enough to save them from losing not only the presidency, but also in state races across the country.

Since President Obama’s first election, Democrats have lost control of the House and Senate, as well as a dozen governors’ houses and roughly 900 state legislative seats. Republicans have control of all levels of government in 24 states, while Democrats have total control over six. Overall, the party seems incapable of reaching out to the middle part of the country, white and middle-class voters.

This contrasts with the 1990s, when a group of party activists consciously rebuilt the party to appeal to middle-class Americans. Groups like the Democratic Leadership Council — for whose think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, I worked for several years — pushed notions of personal responsibility, welfare reform, tough crime policies and economic growth that, embraced by Bill Clinton, expanded the party’s base in the Midwest, the Appalachians and even the Southeast.

Such a shift to the middle is unlikely today. Progressives generally see Hillary Clinton’s loss as largely a rejection of her husband’s neoliberal policies and want to push the party further to the left.

This parallels developments in the United Kingdom, where, following their defeat in 2015, the Labour Party promoted a far-left figure, Jeremy Corbyn, as its leader. This was driven by grassroots progressives — deeply green, multiculturalist and openly socialist. Many, including several high up in Labour’s parliamentary party, believe the party has little chance to win under such leadership.

Democrats face a similar dilemma. Driven by their dominant academic and media “thought police,” any shift to the middle on issues like crime, climate change or regulation now seems unimaginable. Self-described progressives who now dominate the party generally adhere to a series of policies — from open borders to draconian climate change policies — that are unlikely to play well outside the coastal enclaves.

A very nice liberal broadcaster asked me earlier this week whether I am worried about the future of the Republican party. Funny question. There are 25 states in which the state legislatures and governorships are controlled by Republicans, and two states with executive/legislative divides in which there are Republican legislative majorities large enough to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Sixty-eight of the country’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers are Republican-run. There are only four states with Democratic governors and legislatures; it is true that these include one of our most populous states (California), but the majority of Americans live in states in which there are Republican trifectas or veto-proof legislative majorities. Two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control.

Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just won the presidency. Democrats control the dean of students’ office at Oberlin.

And Democrats have responded to their recent electoral defeat with riots, arson, and Alex Jones–level conspiracy theories. Progressives have just raised $5 million to press for a recount in several states. Clinton sycophant Paul Krugman, sounding exactly like every well-mannered conspiracy nut you’ve ever known, says the election “probably wasn’t hacked,” but “conspiracies do happen” and “now that it’s out there” — (who put it out there?) — “an independent investigation is called for.” Maybe it isn’t the Republican party whose future needs worrying about.

I worry more about America’s.

Plus: “The longer-term problem for the Democrats is that they are finding out that they have to play by their own rules, which are the rules of identity politics. This is a larger problem for the Democratic party than is generally appreciated. The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union.”

If you’re a liberal, anything is better than admitting that you lost. So now, just weeks after cautioning Donald Trump’s supporters that they had better accept the results of the election (unlike the Democrats in 2000 and 2004), Democrats led by Jill Stein are demanding recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Left-wingers have donated millions of dollars, and the Hillary Clinton campaign has announced that it will participate in Stein’s recount efforts.

The presidential election wasn’t particularly close: Trump won, 306-232. Still, if you convert Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton victories, she would edge Trump out, 278 to 260. That is obviously the basis on which those states were chosen. However, there is zero chance that a recount will change the result in any of those states, let alone all of them. Trump won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes, Michigan by 10,704 votes, and Pennsylvania by more than 70,000 votes. Lots of luck with those recounts.

I dunno, there’s a lot at stake and they’re good at “finding” votes. If I were Trump I’d be lawyered up and on top of this.

Meanwhile, in the unlikely event that they do “find” enough votes to change the outcome, I think Trump supporters will be justified in going just as wild as Democrats would if the roles were reversed.

YOU’RE NOT TELLING ME IT’S A SCAM, ARE YOU? The Mysterious Case Of Jill Stein’s Surging Recount Costs. “Apparently, the more money she raises the more expensive the recount effort becomes. . . . So, with nearly $5mm raised so far, the question is no longer whether recounts will occur in WI, MI and PA but just how much Jill Stein will be able to drain from the pockets of disaffected Hillary supporters to fund her long-shot efforts. All that said, here is Jill Stein admitting to CNN that she has absolutely no evidence of election hacking….even though she asks that you please keep sending your money anyway.”

REALIGNMENT: Will the Midwest Stay Republican? The Democrats should probably spend the next four years calling midwesterners ignorant racists to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Related: What Happened In Minnesota: “Although Donald Trump narrowly lost the state of Minnesota to Hillary Clinton, Minnesota Republicans achieved remarkable results in legislative races. Republicans amplified their majority to an unprecedented number for a presidential-year election in the state House of Representatives and captured a one-vote majority in the state Senate (again, in a presidential election year when the turnout advantage usually accrues to Democrats). The result in the state Senate were striking as well. As Patrick Coolican put it in the Star Tribune: ‘Senate Republicans have endured the indignities of minority status for all but two of the past 44 years[.]'”

Apparently one in five members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) voted Trump and one in three — an even higher percentage of members of the National Education Association (NEA) — went for the real estate mogul despite what union leaders advocated, according to USA Today.

As a result, union leaders are scrambling to try to figure out why so many of their own members broke for the GOP on Election Day. But at least one union chief is calling her own members “sexist” over it all.

In recent comments, AFT President Randi Weingarten accused her own membership of sexism for refusing to vote for Hillary.

“Frankly I was always concerned about whether the country was ready to have a female president,” Weingarten said. “There was an intensity of hatred that male political figures never get. So I think we’re never really going to understand it.”

HOW A TRAIN TICKET could have saved the Clinton campaign. “Hillary Clinton ignored her husband’s advice and thus neglected the Rust Belt when campaigning. The Rust Belt ultimately rejected her. These rural voters — who heavily supported Barack Obama on the prospect of hope and change — voted for Trump in what they may believe to be their own economic self-interest. . . . The Capitol Limited is a 780-mile Amtrak route from the nation’s capital to Chicago. It traces several hundred miles of flyover country, a slow burn through the Rust Belt and the remnants of a 20th-century economic boom. Politicians en route to Chicago clearly prefer the two-hour flight to an 18-hour train ride. But if Clinton or any other Democratic leader had simply boarded the train, they might have seen first hand what this stretch of land has become over the last 40 years. . . . This is where Americans used to make things, the backbone of a rich and great economy. In these towns there are no “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, no HGTV fixer uppers, no grand plans to push capital back into desperate communities. From the train window, all one sees are the skeletons of something once great, something gutted in favor of cheap Chinese imports and trade deals that underestimated the economic impact on middle America.”

Five days later, old mice did see some benefits from having young blood in their veins, including better muscle repair. But Conboy, who reported her findings in Nature Communications, says the really striking finding was just how bad old blood was for the younger animals. The aged blood inhibited the formation of brain cells in young mice and caused the animals to fall behind their peers in a strength test where they are hung upside down on a wire mesh. “The young mice became almost as decrepit as the old ones,” she says.

The research suggests that one day, instead of getting transfusions from young people, aged people will instead go to a medical facility to get their blood cleared of proteins that may build up and promote aging. Conboy says she and other scientists are working to identify what those molecules are.

Faster, please. Plus:

Given the swift and negative effects of old blood on younger mice—the results appeared immediately—this type of research could eventually raise questions about the age of blood-bank donors. A 2008 study in Blood found that the average age of blood donors in the U.S. was 35, but since repeat donors tend to be older, about 35 percent of blood came from people over 50, including many in their 60s.

FIVE THIRTY EIGHT: Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain The Election Results. “According to a report Tuesday in New York Magazine, a group of computer scientists and election lawyers have approached the Hillary Clinton campaign with evidence they believe suggests the election might have been hacked to make it appear that Donald Trump won the Electoral College when Clinton really did. The hacking claim appears to be based on concerns about tampering with electronic voting machines. We’ve looked into the claim — or at least, our best guess of what’s being claimed based on what has been reported — and statistically, it doesn’t check out.”

Each January, tens of thousands of pro-lifers descend upon our nation’s capitol to mark the solemn occasion of the Roe v. Wade anniversary. That’s the month in 1973 the Supreme Court used a fake law to create a fake right to kill our own offspring, and a body count that has now reached well over 50 million began.

Each January, this mass demonstration of conviction rarely gets more than perfunctory coverage by major U.S. newspapers, cable news networks and the nightly broadcast news. However, last weekend a few blocks away from the site of the march, the meeting of a couple hundred racists trying to rebrand themselves as the “alt-right” received days of coverage.

Type “March for Life” into Google News and 4.6 million results come up. That’s a pretty hefty number until you type in “alt right” and see it returns more than 6 million. How come a term most of us hadn’t heard of, until the just-concluded 2016 presidential election, gets more attention than a national protest that is older than Google itself?

Talk about your fake news.

But a different kind of fake news spread on social media is what a growing chorus of journalists, liberals and tech leaders (three overlapping groups obviously) at least partially blame for Donald Trump’s election victory.

For most Americans, it is hardly a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for quite some time, actually: Dan Rather’s fake gotcha story on George W. Bush during the 2004 election. ABC News’ failure to disclose ties between George Stephanopoulos and Hillary Clinton before his fake interview about the Clinton Foundation. The more than 24 “journalists” who took their fake objectivity with them to work in the Obama administration. When CNN, PBS NewsHour, Mic.com, The Washington Post, Slate and many others thought fake news was kinda cool because the fake news was written by liberal comedians for cable satire shows.

See, our industry has been peddling quite a bit of hackery and partisanship as “news” for years now, so the public no longer trusts us.

Former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. is emerging as a possible contender for transportation secretary, or another Cabinet post, in Donald Trump’s budding administration.

The telegenic Ford — who served five terms in Congress representing Tennessee and is the son of a long-serving Democratic congressman from Memphis — has worked as a managing director at Morgan Stanley since 2011, and is a regular news analyst on MSNBC.

Ford endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, and he and his wife, Emily, contributed to Clinton’s campaign. But Ford is also close with Trump’s children, Don Jr., Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, an associate said.

A “Saturday Night Live” star is blasting Donald Trump in an expletive-filled online post, after the president-elect criticized last week’s show as unfunny and “biased.”

“F— you bitch,” comedian Pete Davidson posted on Instagram, in response to Trump’s critical tweet about “SNL.” The 23-year-old comedian — who had supported Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — wrote to his more than 400,000 Instagram followers that he’s “never been more proud.”

Huh – I thought one had to be a household name to be a star, ala Chevy Chase, Belushi, Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Dennis Miller, etc. Perhaps though, Davidson qualifies for the old mid-’90s-era Wired magazine “Jargon Watch” definition of a “micro-star,” which explained that Warhol was just slightly off – in the future (err, now), everyone will be famous to 15 other people.

Fortunately though, slightly wiser minds at Saturday Night Live have spotted a place that Davidson can move to where the real world need never intrude:

PREDICTIONS ARE HARD, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THE FUTURE. AND ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT IN THE SLIGHTEST. Another Quiet Tornado and Hurricane Season. Al Gore Hardest Hit. “Despite Al Gore’s continued dire warnings, most recently while campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, 2016 is turning out to be a remarkably quiet storm year. This continues the dual trends of quiet storm seasons combined with Gore’s dire pronouncements of increased storm activity. We are often reminded not to mess with Mother Nature. Evidently, we should also take care not to mess with her sense of humor.”

Some electors are lobbying their Republican counterparts to vote for someone other than Trump in an attempt to deny him the 270 votes required to elect him, according to the news outlet.
They are also contemplating whether to cast their votes for someone other than Hillary Clinton, like Mitt Romney or Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio).

With at least six electors already vowing to become “faithless,” the defection could be the most significant since 1808, when six Democratic-Republican electors refused to vote for James Madison, choosing vice presidential candidate George Clinton instead.

The electors acknowledge that it is unlikely that they will be able to block Trump from gaining office, Politico reported, but they are optimistic that their effort will raise enough questions about the Electoral College to reform or abolish it.

No participant in the 2016 presidential election fares well in the Pew Research Center’s post-election voter survey: the candidates, the parties, and the electorate itself all receive historically poor marks from respondents. But the most despised institution of them all is the news media, which scored lower than ever before.

To be fair, the media stooped lower than ever before. Plus:

The press was in the crosshairs of both campaigns throughout this election, with Republicans arguing that the mainstream media was systematically biased against their candidate, and Democrats insisting that the media was “normalizing” Trump, and giving too much play to Hillary Clinton’s various email and Foundation-related controversies. While voters on both sides were unusually critical of the way the press conducted itself, the anger is especially intense among Republicans, huge majorities of whom say that the media was “too tough” on Trump and “too easy” on Hillary Clinton.

Many post-election analyses have highlighted the role of right-wing media, including “fake news” propaganda sites, in allegedly influencing the election outcome. But as we noted on Friday, this phenomenon was only made possible by the broad-based decline in trust in mainstream outlets.

PARTY OF EXTREMISM: Desperate Democrats Turn To Death Threats. “Democrats are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they lost the presidential election. Now they are threatening to kill Republican electors unless they switch allegiance and vote for Hillary Clinton when the electoral college meets on December 19.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, she pretty clearly deserves to be prosecuted, and any lesser-ranking official in her position would be. On the other hand, setting a precedent in which the new administration prosecutes the outgoing administration is dangerous, and gives people an incentive to cut (even more) corners to retain power. The Roman Republic had problems like this. Perhaps the best situation is to retain the possibility of prosecution, but not use it: The value of the Sword of Damocles, as they say, is that it hangs, not that it falls. But it still rankles.

Yes, defund the ridiculously large staff that currently earns upward of $1.5 million a year serving Michelle Obama; abolish the federally funded bully pulpit from which the presidential spouses have historically advocated for healthy eating, literacy, child welfare, anti-drug programs, mental health issues and beautification of highways. The president’s spouse isn’t a specimen of American royalty. By giving her a federal budget and nonstop press coverage, we endorse a pernicious kind of neo-nepotism that says, pay special attention to the person not because she’s earned it or is inherently worthy of our notice but because of who she’s related to by marriage.

The hairstyles, fashion choices, vacation destinations and pet projects of the president’s spouse are newsworthy only to the mentally vacant. Other democracies, such as the United Kingdom, bestow no such honors upon the spouses of their leaders and are better for it. To use an au courant phrase, the office of the first spouse is a swamp in need of draining. Won’t somebody please dispatch a dredger to the East Wing?

My beef isn’t against Melania Trump, the next first spouse, who seems to be a poised, harmless individual. I actually started composing this column in my head when the election of Hillary Clinton seemed inevitable. We already give mega-millionaire Bill Clinton a huge payout to run and staff his office under the federal Former Presidents Act. He’s collected in excess of $16 million since 2001. Why, I thought, give him additional funding and staff as first spouse?

Indeed.

Although to be fair, the First Lady’s budget and staff were modest prior to January, 2009.

Terry Brown is a 55-year-old plumber in Stanley, a small North Carolina town that is 90 percent white and whose motto is “Jesus Saves.” He is the sort of person media elites and coastal liberals allegedly overlooked or scorned before Donald Trump’s surprise victory.

These arrogant sophisticates, we are told, live in a world of people just like themselves, making them incapable of understanding the real America. So Trump’s victory hit them like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky.

Brown, however, was not surprised. “I don’t know anyone who would vote for Hillary Clinton,” he told Los Angeles Times reporter Jenny Jarvie the day after the election.

He doesn’t know anyone who would vote for Clinton? That’s quite a feat, because 60.5 million of his fellow Americans did. Apparently, there are Trump voters who live in their own bubbles — distant from and deaf to ordinary people who think differently.

* * * * * * * *

With polls in hand, the media concluded that the electorate, including working-class white men in small towns, had seen through Trump. That was the ultimate media failure: not expecting too little of these voters but expecting too much.

The left is trying to come to grips with its utter rejection, and its response to Donald Trump will be to fall back on an endless series of freakoutrages – hyperbolic, unhinged, hack media-fueled spasms of faux moral panic every time he dares do anything.

Appoint someone to a job? Freak out – it’s an outrage!

Go to dinner? Freak out – it’s an outrage!

Actually keep promises made to the voters? Freak out – it’s an outrage!

But it isn’t going to work. Not anymore. Not with the form of the Destructor Hillary and the rest of super smart Team Smugfail chose. Freakoutrage fatigue is in effect. You can cry Wolf Blitzer all day long and nobody cares.

It’s important to understand why liberals are so angry and so scared. They are angry because they believe they have a moral right to command us, apparently bestowed by Gaia or #Science or having gone to Yale, and we are irredeemably deplorable for not submitting to their benevolent dictatorship.

They are scared because they fear we will wage the same kind of campaign of petty (and not so petty) oppression, intimidation, and bullying that they intended to wage upon us.

Indeed. Plus: “I was considering being magnanimous in our total victory, but that lasted until a bunch of loving, tolerant, peaceful anti-Trump demonstrators jumped my friend and hurt his dog.”

THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH: Hillary or Blood? Democrats and Post-Election Angry Mobs. “The violence is not that different from what happened in 1876 when Democrats were demanding that year’s popular vote winner Samuel Tilden be president, as it seemed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes would likely ascend to the presidency. . . . Angry Democratic mobs across the country would chant, “Tilden or blood,” and reportedly in a dozen states, club-wielding “Tilden Minute Men” had formed threatening to march into Washington to take the White House for their candidate. This came to Tilden’s chagrin, who sought to calm the rowdiness, as he didn’t want to be responsible for an insurrection, nor did he see it as a viable path to the presidency. Today’s angry Democratic mob perhaps aren’t yet chanting Hillary or Blood as they did in 1876. But some are getting violent.”

And the Dem leadership isn’t trying to calm the rowdiness, but is inciting it.

What I find slightly more interesting and, given what I know about the political self-satisfaction of the class of people that can afford tickets to Hamilton, less likely to be noted outside of actual left or right circles, is what the decision to speak once necessarily implies about all the decisions not to speak. Every day, especially given both ticket prices and the nature of its audience and cultural appeal, Hamilton plays to an audience of neoliberals, militarists, wielders of economic power, beneficiaries of massive corporate corruption and economic and political inequality, people who exploit connections in a relatively closed circle of the rich and powerful, etc. And those are just the nights when Hillary Clinton catches the show! A substantial part of its consumer base and business model is brokers, corporate lawyers, legacy admits to the Ivy League, executives, managers, investors, media elites, and so on. Its audience base is people who can afford to complain about the help, or praise their nannies (who they may or may not pay well or legally), not the nannies themselves. No doubt the regular audience could do with a pointed extra-script lecture or two as well! But that would be bad for business, and disturb the audience-validating, as opposed to audience-challenging, function that is the essence of musical theater. None of this yet reaches Hamilton Inc.’s cozy relationship to President Obama, and the mutual benefits and ego-stroking that were involved in it. Maybe the PBS documentary cut this part out, but I don’t recall the actors at the White House performance of Hamilton breaking script to say, “Mr. President, we, sir–we–can’t help but notice that you have raided and deported the hell out of undocumented immigrants in record numbers. Also, what the [deleted] is up with the drones, or Syria, or….” I suppose that actually would have been seen as rude in people’s eyes. But once you start picking and choosing your exceptions and special occasions, of course you are making a political statement, conscious or not, about all the morally complicit and dubious audiences you are happy to flatter, the number of questionable actions–deportations, assassinations, killings, etc.–you are willing to “normalize,” and so on.

It’s contrary to the laws of nature for a tabloid writer to tell the gentry media not to go berserk. It’s like a cat telling his owner to stop coughing up hairballs or Iron Man asking Captain America to be less arrogant. Here at The Post, our mission statement does not include understatement. We provide journalistic Red Bull, not Sominex.

Nevertheless, a word of neighborly advice to our more genteel media friends, the ones who sit at the high table in their pristine white dinner jackets and ball gowns. You’ve been barfing all over yourselves for a week and a half, and it’s revolting to watch.

For your own sake, and that of the republic for which you allegedly work, wipe off your chins and regain your composure. I didn’t vote for him either, but Trump won. Pull yourselves together and deal with it, if you ever want to be taken seriously again. . . . Hysteria is causing leading media organizations to mix up their news reporting with their editorializing like never before, but instead of mingling like chocolate and peanut butter the two are creating a taste that’s like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.

Plus:

Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as ‘Democratic operatives with bylines’ is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back. . . . This fall WikiLeaks confirmed everything conservatives have been saying about the media for more than 20 years. CNN, you have been busted. You allowed Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile to get hold of town-hall questions in advance and help Hillary Clinton prep with them. . . . John Harwood, New York Times/CNBC reporter and Republican debate moderator, you have been busted. You asked John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, for questions you could pose to Jeb Bush in an interview.

Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist and longtime phony “nonpartisan” political reporter, you have been busted. You reached out to DNC flack Eric Walker and asked for help putting together a “Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump” story.

Not only are you evidently an undercover Democratic Party operative who should be drawing checks from the DNC instead of from The WaPo, you’re a tired hack who can’t even come up with his own column ideas without assistance.

Schumer’s threat is real. During the debate on Alito, Harry Reid, who was then the Democratic leader of the House, and then-senator Barack Obama attempted a filibuster against him. But far from being intimidated, Donald Trump is likely to relish such a fight. During the annual meeting of the Federalist Society, the nation’s premier conservative and libertarian legal group, a group of its chapter presidents got an inside look at some of Trump’s thinking. Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president and a leading adviser to Republicans on judicial nominees, told the group that Trump isn’t going to be dictated to.

Fresh from a meeting with Trump in New York last Wednesday, Leo said that Trump knows the importance of the Supreme Court to the voters who elected him. He noted that exit polls showed that 21 percent of Americans said the Supreme Court was “the most important factor” in their decision about which presidential candidate to support. By a ratio of three to two, such voters went for Trump over Hillary Clinton. “Mr. Trump has a plane and double-digit victories where Senate Democrats are up for reelection,” Leo told the group. “Obstructing his nominees will be a political loser.”

Indeed, Democrats have 25 of their 48 Senate seats up before voters in 2018. Many are from states Obama lost twice and Clinton once: Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana knows that his state rejected Obama in his reelection in 2012, voted against Hillary, and is home to Mike Pence, the newly elected vice president–elect.

Four other Democratic senators are from states Clinton lost: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The prospect of a President Trump visiting their states and holding rallies to whip up support for his Supreme Court nominee would make many Democratic senators uncomfortable, especially if Trump supplemented his efforts with TV and social-media campaigns.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Best Thing About Trump’s Win? America Called Bullshit on the Cult of Clinton. “By the Cult of Hillary Clinton, I don’t mean the nearly 62 million Americans who voted for her. I have not one doubt that they are as mixed and normal a bag of people as the Trumpites are. No, I mean the Hillary machine—the celebs and activists and hacks who were so devoted to getting her elected and who have spent the past week sobbing and moaning over her loss. These people exhibit cult-like behavior far more than any Trump cheerer I’ve come across. . . . It’s all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream, Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn’t even realize it’s doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one second, in Heffernan’s words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in the political echo chamber.”

Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of reporters as “Democratic operatives with bylines” is taking root in the American mind. Among independents, according to Gallup in September, the media had an approval rating of 30 percent; among Republicans 14. Almost everyone but Democrats think the media are biased, and support for that view goes way back.

In November 2008, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said readers who complained about shallow coverage and pro-Obama bias were “right on both counts,” publishing tallies that proved the paper had been far more critical of Obama’s opponent Sen. John McCain than of Obama. A few weeks later, “Game Change” co-author Mark Halperin said the media showed “extreme pro-Obama coverage” in a “disgusting failure.”

In 2012, The New York Times’ public editor Arthur Brisbane said the paper “basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008” and cited a study that showed the Times’ coverage had been far more approving of Obama than it had been of President Reagan and both Presidents Bush.

In January 2008, NBC’s Brian Williams was honest enough to point out that the network’s reporter covering Obama had said, “It’s hard to be objective covering this guy.” Williams immediately demanded the reporter be fired for admitting to being unable to do his job.

Just kidding: Williams praised the reporter, calling him “courageous.”

In 2016, the media didn’t even pretend it wasn’t working in Hillary Clinton’s interests.

SCOTT ADAMS: “The only people who will think Trump is a racist going forward are people who haven’t read this article. If you find someone like that, send them the link. This piece is a brilliant service to the country. Breathtaking.”

Excerpt:

Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source).

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population. . . .

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

I avoided pushing this point any more since last October because I didn’t want to look like I was supporting Trump, or accidentally convince anyone else to support Trump. But since we’re past the point where that matters anymore, I want to present my case. . . .

First, I want to go over Donald Trump’s official, explicit campaign message. Yes, it’s possible for candidates’ secret feelings to differ from their explicit messages, but the things they say every single day and put on their website and include in their speeches are still worth going over to see what image they want to project.

Trump’s official message has been the same vague feel-good pro-diversity rhetoric as any other politician.

I feel a little like a hungry Sid Blumenthal looking down at a box full of live, white mice: Where to begin?

Well schadenfreude is always a good way to get your day going. The stories about Hillary measuring the drapes are all over Washington. They literally popped champagne on the campaign plane on Election Day.

I like to imagine Bill Clinton going through binders full of women — and not the Romney kind — picking out the “deputies” he’d like to work with in the White House and Sid Blumenthal letting his fingers wander over an assortment of fine Italian leather riding crops pondering his return to power.

Someone recently told me that the Bill Clinton Presidential Library is built off-center on its campus in anticipation of the day that Hillary’s presidential library would go along side it. I can’t find any corroboration of this, save for the fact that if you look at these pictures, it certainly seems plausible.

Read the whole thing. By the way, I edited a rather prescient and forward-thinking Victor Davis Hanson article last year with a similar title; here’s the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired Photoshop I created to illustrate it, with Bill’s presidential library, and a Hillary “H” logo on it:

A FEW WEEKS AGO, THE HAMILTON CAST HELD A HILLARY FUNDRAISER. LAST NIGHT, WITHOUT REALIZING IT, THEY HELD A TRUMP FUNDRAISER. Note Trump’s deliberate use of SJW “safe-space” and “harassment” language. Not an accident, I’m sure. Choose the form of your Destructor, indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: History: “The audience had just witnessed the reenacted shooting to death of the great American, Alexander Hamilton. The actor delivering the lecture was Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton. Years ago, in a theater, a President of the United States was shot by a politically overheated actor. I understand hustling Mike Pence out of that place.”

From the comments: “Being a dick to people who paid to see you is #HowYouGotTrump.”

Plus: “Other than that, how was the play, Mr. Pence?”

And: “It’s funny because the left right now is all ‘I don’t feel safe!’, but they are the once blocking the roads, turning theatre nights into verbal attacks, and rushing the speakers on college campuses.”

Also: “The cast are not scared of Pence. If they were, they wouldn’t insult him. It takes no bravery for you to mock someone that all your social peers think is terrible. It takes no bravery for you to claim the moral high ground over someone you and the media paint as a backwards reject from the 1950s or earlier. This was craven; people who think it took courage to speak out against someone the media wants us to hate need to readjust their definitions of courage.”

As America recovers from last week’s shock election results that ended with a President-elect Donald Trump, the finger pointing is in full swing. If there’s someone poised to pick up a large share of the blame, it’s the white women who voted 53% for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump got a larger share of Latino and black voters than Mitt Romney or John McCain. Yet the story isn’t Hillary Clinton not being able to secure as much of their vote as Barack Obama. The story of the election is that Trump got a majority of the white woman vote. The blame game is strong. “How could they?” people wonder.

It’s a fair question. Many things that Trump said about women were offensive. But it’s strange that people focus only on women being offended. Trump said many offensive things about many people, including men. We don’t wonder how shorter men could have voted for him when he called Marco Rubio little. Why should women be insulted on behalf of other women more than men are on behalf of other men?

There’s also the continuing idea that women should all line up a certain way on “women’s issues.” But the fact is that women are split on a lot of them.

It’s almost as if they can think for themselves, which I’ve been assured by feminists is impossible.

Kanye West has said he would have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential elections. Speaking at a concert in San Jose, California, the rapper – who has in the past been a vocal supporter of the Democratic party – said he did not vote last week but if he had, his allegiance would have been with the Republican representative rather than Hillary Clinton.

West’s statement, which was met with boos from the audience in San Jose, was caught on camera by one Twitter user.

West elaborated throughout the show. He stated that while he admired Trump’s debating style – saying that it was “genius” because it “worked” – his true reason for backing the Republican was that his win would inspire racists to reveal themselves. “This is the beginning,” West said, according to one attendee, adding: “Neither candidate would fix racism in this country.”

According to reports from the show, West, who has said he will run for president in 2020, also stated that black people should “stop focusing on racism”. “We are in a racist country,” he said. “Period.”